It’s used to manage the drives installed in a computer—like hard disk drives (internal and external), optical disk drives, and flash drives. It can be used to partition and format drives, assign drive letters, and much more.
Disk Management Availability
Disk Management is available in most versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000.
How to Open Disk Management
The most common way to access Disk Management is via the Computer Management utility, which you can get to from Administrative Tools in the Control Panel. It can also be started by executing diskmgmt.msc via the Command Prompt or another command-line interface in Windows.
How to Use Disk Management
Disk Management has two main sections—a top and a bottom:
The top section contains a list of all the partitions, formatted or not, that Windows recognizes.The bottom section contains a graphical representation of the physical drives installed in the computer.
Performing certain actions on the drives or partitions make them available or unavailable to Windows and configure them to be used by Windows in certain ways. Here are some common things that you can do in Disk Management:
Partition a drive Format a drive Change a drive’s letter Shrink a partition Extend a partition Delete a partition Change a drive’s file system
More Information
The Disk Management tool has a graphical interface like a regular program and is similar in function to the command line utility diskpart, which was a replacement of an earlier utility called fdisk. You can also use Disk Management to check free hard drive space. Look under the Capacity and Free Space columns (in the Disk List or Volume List view) to see the total storage capacity of all the disks as well as how much free space is remaining, which is expressed in units (i.e., MB and GB) as well as a percentage. Disk Management is where you can create and attach virtual hard disk files in Windows 11, 10, and 8. These are single files that act as hard drives, which means you can store them on your main hard drive or in other places like external hard drives. To build a virtual disk file with the VHD or VHDX file extension, use the Action > Create VHD menu. Opening one is done through the Attach VHD option. The View menu is how you can change which panes you see at the top and bottom and how you change the colors and patterns Disk Management uses to display unallocated space, free space, logical drives, spanned volumes, RAID-5 volumes, and other disk regions.
Alternatives to Disk Management
Some free disk partitioning tools let you perform most of the same tasks supported in Disk Management but without even needing to open Microsoft’s tool at all. Plus, some of them are even easier to use. MiniTool Partition Wizard Free, for instance, lets you make a bunch of changes to your disks to see how they’ll affect the sizes, etc., and then you can apply all the changes at once after you’re satisfied. Something else you can do with that program is wipe a partition or whole disk clean with DoD 5220.22-M, which is a data sanitization method not supported with Disk Management.
